A HISTORY OF THE IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR
In January 1917, the Colonel Commanding the Irish Guards contacted Rudyard Kipling, the world’s best-known author, to ask if he would write the regimental history of the Great War.
Kipling readily accepted and for the next five and a half years Battalion diaries and maps, along with other official records and private correspondence, were delivered to Bateman’s, his secluded home near Burwash in Sussex.
His private secretary during this endeavour was Dorothy Ponton and she recorded him as saying, “This will be my great work; it is being done with agony and bloody sweat.”
Final proofs were completed in January 1923, with publication across two volumes in April of that year.
Deep personal reasons lay behind his agreement to write the history.
John, his only son and a second lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion, had been killed leading his men into action in the early stages of the Battle of Loos.
The invitation to write the history of the Guard’s was couched in terms of creating a ‘memento’ of his son’s service.
John’s fate is briefly summed up in the second volume of the history. On the 27th September 1915 in the attack around Chalk Pit Wood, ‘second Lieutenant Kipling was wounded and missing.’ John, only eighteen and six weeks old, was not found.
His loss had a tremendous impact on the physical and mental health of both parents. Throughout the writing of the history Kipling suffered increasingly from poor personal health, completing his commission ‘by dint of sheer will-power’.
Kipling is aware of the limitations within which he is working as a historian.
‘A battalion's field is bounded by its own vision. Even within these limits, there is large room for error. Witnesses to phases of fights die and are dispersed; the ground over which they fought is battered out of recognition in a few hours; survivors confuse dates, places and personalities, and in the trenches, the monotony of the waiting days and the repetition work of repairs breed mistakes and false judgments.’
Kipling knew many of the young men who fought. They visited Bateman’s and told their stories.
Throughout his writing career he had a personal interest in representing the experiences of the common soldier, and examples of this are numerous throughout his Great War history. His under stated, matter-of-fact descriptions of warfare and its individual impacts are emotive and can be harrowing.
‘By night the front-line sat and shivered round braziers in the freezing dark while bits of new- made trench fell around them and listening-posts at the head of old saps and barricaded alleys reported imaginary night attacks. When they worked on a captured trench they were like as not to find it bottomed, or worse still, revetted, with an enemy corpse, which the sliding mud would deliver hideously into the arms of the party. On such occasions the sensitive would be sick, while the more hardened warmed and ate their food unperturbed amid all the offal.’
Pre-war, Kipling had issued numerous warnings about the might of Germany and his personal belief that it was a threat to civilization and the Empire. The inhuman behaviour of the Hun is amply illustrated in his history.
They are described as ‘malignant apes’ as regards the wanton destruction they leave in their wake. It was pro-Boche-agents who were responsible for mixing steel shavings into the baled hay that killed a number of army horses.
Passing through Ypres, it was felt necessary to ‘warn the companies that the enemy might attack behind a screen of Belgian women and children, in which case the battalion would have to fire through them.’
Before the war, Kipling had regularly warned of the lack of preparation and readiness for military action of British forces for a European war. And this is expressed a number of times in the history.
In relation to the 2nd Battalion, he writes, ‘They had parted long ago with any delusion as to the War ending that year or the next. The information that came to them by word of mouth was not of the sort dispensed in the Press, and they knew, perhaps a little more than the public, how inadequate where our preparations.’
When the ‘war was still young’, the 1st Battalion were ‘taught how to throw bombs made out of jam pots…..the jam pot bomb died early but not before it had caused the sufficiency of trouble to its users.’ As Kipling puts it, ‘the price of making war on the spot of the moment was paid, day in and day out with the bodies of young men subject to every form of death.’
The history was published to some mixed reviews. John Buchan writing in The Times praised the portrayal of events and its ‘reverence and understanding’; whilst Edmund Blunden accused Kipling of being ‘too dispassionate’.
Whilst there is no doubt that in his fiction, he could powerfully explore the impact of the war – no better short story than The Gardener illustrates this; the life of Helen Turrell, the death of her ‘nephew’ and her visit to his grave – the History of the Irish Guards is also a literary work. It is this that makes it readable in a way that many or most other regimental histories are not. As a personal labour of love and remembrance and a testament to the cost of war it has stood the test of time.
Full Text and Maps
The Irish Guards and the Great War
Volume 1
https://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/IrishGuardsv1/index.html
The Irish Guards and the Great War
Volume 2
https://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/IrishGuardsv2/index.html
REFERENCES
1st Battalion, Irish Guards prepare to leave Wellington Barracks following the outbreak of the First World War, 6 August 1914.
Mrs Albert Broom, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Irish_Guards_leave_for_France.jpg
John Kipling
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/My_Boy_Jack_John_Kipling.jpg
1st Battalion, Irish Guards marching through a French village on the Western Front, August 1915.
Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Irish_Guards_marching_in_France%2C_1915.jpg
Troops of the Irish Guards during respirator drill, Battle of the Somme, 1916.
Lieutenant John Wawrick Brooke, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Irish_Guards_Gas_Warfare_Battle_of_the_Somme.jpg